“If you have a story that seems worth telling,” Dashiell Hammett once said, “and you think you can tell it worthily, then the thing for you to do is to tell it, regardless of whether it has to do with sex, sailors or mounted policemen.”

Try a rare slipper orchid, its bloom as big as a man's hand, its “petals as broad as a boulevard, their color a shade of pinkish purple (that) looked like a frozen explosion, a freeze-framed blast of raspberry fireworks painted on the richest velvet.” Even before it had a name, “the most beautiful orchid in the world” was worth as much as $10,000 on the black market. Behind the scandal it caused at one of the world's most reputable scientific institutions — the venerable Marie Selby Botanical Gardens in Sarasota, Fla. — is a story with as many twists and turns as Hammett's “Maltese Falcon,” and just about the same amount of greed, jealousy, backstabbing and subterfuge.

Florida environmental writer Craig Pittman, a reporter for the Tampa Bay Times who covered the unfolding drama from the beginning, tells the tale just as Hammett would have, with a keen ear for dialogue, cliffhangers galore and the tenacity to hack through a virtual jungle of lies and buck-passing.

It all began in 2002, when a Virginia orchid collector named Michael Kovach walked into Selby's Orchid Identification Center with a rare slipper orchid he'd bought at a roadside stand in Peru. Wild orchids are protected by an international treaty, called CITES, that permits them to be exported only if grown in a nursery or a lab, but Kovach had slipped through the Lima airport and U.S. Customs in Miami unnoticed.

A storm of controversy, including accusations of orchid smuggling, followed.

Much has been written about orchid hunters and their outlandish but glamorous lives, most of it chronicled in Susan Orlean's “The Orchid Thief” (1998) and Eric Hansen's “Orchid Fever” (2001).

Pittman wisely avoids this well-trodden territory. His orchidophiles spend most of their time in Sarasota, Tampa, Miami and Vermont. Nothing screams swashbuckling. But they still qualify as “the ones who put the ‘cult' in horticulture.” So, while “The Scent of Scandal” may read like a mystery, it doesn't lead to any bodies. It's a bloodless crime, and the queasy thrills it offers in every tightly plotted chapter come from watching a community of upstanding, scientific, reasonable plant lovers lie, cheat and sell each other down the river if it meant staying out of the slammer.